This is my response to a book, Globalize Liberation, edited by David Solnit and published in 2004. Media activists James John Bell and Patrick Reinsborough sent me a copy and asked for my thoughts about it; the result turned into an essay of some length, which got a certain amount of exposure and discussion online. Looking at the travails of progressive activism since its publication, I find very little that needs revision, except the tone of relative optimism expressed toward (...) the end. (shrink)

Over and above the probable peaking of worldwide oil production as a current reality, the arrival of hard limits on all energy resources is very much nearer in the future than many people realize. The public discourse on Peak Oil and the associated arrival of hard limitson energy availability has attracted more than its share of brilliant and creative minds. In addition to scientific and technical analysts, thisgroup includes a fair number of generalists who have engaged in broader forms of (...) reflection upon the likely economic, social, political, and cultural effects of Peak Oil and other hard energy limits on the structure of current world civilization. In this paper, I select for examination three such generalists who are both especially talented and widely read by those having an interest in this topic: James Howard Kunstler, John Michael Greer, and Dmitri Orlov. My intention is to survey their central ideas in turn, with a view to forming a reasonably well-developed and concrete notion as to how the impending arrival of hard limits on energy consumption will affect the structure of built space in coming decades. I focus both on the macro-infrastructural level and on what one might term the micro-infrastructural level of the built space within which the denizens of contemporary industrial civilization live their daily lives. Theprincipal focus of the discussion will be on the situation in the United States, though many of the lines of argument presented may be applied much more broadly if suitably adjusted in light of locally prevailing conditions elsewhere. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Crushing Pressures and Radical IdeasJohn Z. Sadler, MD (bio)Back in 2011, I wrote a paper for the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, an Australian journal, for a special issue dedicated to ethical issues associated with psychiatric genetics research. The editor was particularly excited by the recent findings of the 5-HTT allele in psychiatric illness. I had different ideas about what I wanted to write about, and the editor, Michael (...) Robertson, graciously considered them and ultimately published the paper. At the time I was interested in the colossal investment of National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) research dollars in psychiatric genetic research; at the time I was troubled at the lack of on-the-ground clinical implications of this research investment, and figured an Australian journal and referees would be more generous to a critical paper on U.S. funding priorities. I dug into the National Institutes of Health (NIH), NIMH, and National Science Foundation websites and found some crude dollar evidence of respective expenditures for research funding in various disorders and focus areas, and compared these investments to psychiatric genetic research funding commitments. I will not go into details (Sadler, 2011), but the gist was that the psychiatric genetics research enterprise was and had been an extraordinarily expensive enterprise, when other research questions that could be immediately implementable into clinical care improvements remained marginally funded at best. The paper was not read widely and other than a couple of annoyed responses from psychiatric genetic researchers, not much came of it.This concern about funding priorities was one of the reasons why I was pleased to see this paper by Turkheimer and Greer which explores the long term results of the Spit for Science (S4S) initiative, which was launched grandly the same year as my paper’s whisper from down under. I hope this Philosophical Case Conference explores the many dimensions of interest for this paper, which is extraordinarily careful and even handed in its attitude, while at the same time being incisive in its analysis.My focus here is not in the science per se, which is beyond my competence. I’m interested in Turkheimer and Greer’s (T&G) conceptual overview of this research program. More specifically, I focus on T&G’s highlighting of the extraordinary willingness of the S4S authors to interpret prevailingly negative results in the most generous, even misleading, degree possible. I try to provide some possible ways of understanding this kind of research rhetoric exhibited by a cohort of highly respected, very successful scientists.I acknowledge the well-described varieties of interpretive bias that all of us are subject to. First on the list must be confirmation bias, our tendency to interpret situations in terms consistent [End Page 447] with our preconceived notions—in this case, the idea that genetics has something important to do with addictive disorders. Another might be epistemic overconfidence—the tendency to fail at interpretive skepticism in favor of one’s preferred conclusion. Related to this may also be interpretive momentum, the tendency to maintain a conviction about the correctness of one’s expectations and disregard inconsistent findings over the course of a research program—in this case, the multiple S4S studies (O’Sullivan & Schofeld, 2018). However, these kinds of biases tend to “blame” the individual authors’ thinking styles. I opine, though, that other vectors shaping the declaring-success rhetoric are more important.These sources have to do with the state of practice in doing biomedical science research in universities and particularly academic medical centers (AMCs) today. I identify several causal vectors that compel, however subtly, researchers to declare success in the face of failure. I have only picked three, and in no order of importance: 1) funding caps for NIH grants, 2) the overleveraging of university budgets and ballooning dependence on soft money, and 3) the incentivizing of intellectual property development within AMCs.Funding Caps for NIH GrantsIf you are a university or AMC, one way you hold onto your most productive scientists (e.g., grants, publications, discoveries, and status) is by paying them well. Single NIH grants today commonly amount to millions of dollars, and often tens of millions. These bring... (shrink)

At his death in 1945, the influential German philosopher Ernst Cassirer left manuscripts for the fourth and final volume of his magnum opus, _The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms_. John Michael Krois and Donald Phillip Verene have edited these writings and translated them into English for the first time, bringing to completion Cassirer's major treatment of the concept of symbolic form. Ernst Cassirer believed that all the forms of representation that human beings use—language, myth, art, religion, history, science—are symbolic, (...) and the concept of symbolic forms was the basis of his thinking on these subjects. In this volume, which contains one text written in 1928 and another in about 1940, Cassirer presents the metaphysics that is implicit in his epistemology and phenomenology of culture. The earlier text grounds the philosopher's conception of symbolic forms on a notion of human nature that makes a general distinction between Geist and life. In the later text, he discusses Basis Phenomena, an original concept not mentioned in any of his previous works, and he compares his own viewpoint with those of other modern philosophers, notably Bergson and Heidegger. (shrink)

It has been noted that certain similarities can be detected between the work of the Bakhtin Circle and the work of Jürgen Habermas. While I do not deny that these sorts of similarities can be detected, I also argue that the insights of the Bakhtin Circle can be used to provide the basis of a critique of Habermas. My specific aim is to show how Habermas perpetuates a ‘stylistic’ approach to discourse theory. ‘Stylistics’, as conceived by the Bakhtin Circle, explores (...) discourse through the dualism of an objectively defined set of linguistic norms that can be appropriated through the creative linguistic competence of individual speakers. On this understanding, individuals within their everyday environment choose elements from objective linguistic norms in order to make sense of their world. However, a stylistic approach to discourse implicitly denigrates the usefulness of everyday utterances because it suggests that, for language to gain normative meaning and understanding, it must always refer back to an objective linguistic system. By using the Bakhtin Circle’s theoretical insights, I flag up several problems that emerge from Habermas’s particular standpoint on stylistics. (shrink)

This paper puts forth two reasons to hold that at least some mental entities are not physical entities. First argument: Some mental entities (namely, pains and other qualia) cannot possibly differ from how they seem to be, and since this cannot possibly be true of any non-mental entity, it follows that some mental entities are not physical. Second argument: It is necessarily on theoretical grounds, as opposed to strictly experiential grounds, that mental entities are identified with physical entities. Water is (...) legitimately believed to consist of microparticles of a certain kind because there is independent reason to believe that entities relevantly similar to such particles, supposing them to exist, are relevantly similar to water, so far as the latter can be directly observed. It is not, nor could it possibly be, on the basis of some directly observed concomitance between molecule-activity and water-activity that we believe the former to constitute the latter. It obviously isn't on the basis of any directly observed concomitance between brain-activity and mental-activity that the former is believed to mediate the latter. At the same time, there cannot possibly be any other legitimate basis for that belief. The reason for this is that nothing relevantly similar to mental activity can possibly be observed to accompany anything relevantly similar to brain activity. And the reason for the latter fact is that, even if brain-activity and mental-activity occur in the same physical space, they occur in different data-spaces: when you experience a pain, it is not given to you as occurring in the same spatial manifold as the falling of a stone or any other physical event. In general, mental events, whether or not they in fact have spatial coordinates, cannot possibly be observed (experienced) as having such coordinates, and for this reason they cannot be observed as having the same coordinates as brain-events. Thus, there can be no reason to grant the existence of the concomitances whose existence is needed to legitimate the bridge principles on the basis of which the mental could legitimately be identified with the physical. Note on the second argument: This argument doesn't show that the mental is non-physical; it shows only that there cannot possibly be any justification for the belief that the mental to be physical or, at any rate, that, if there is such a justification, it isn't comparable to the justification for the belief that water consists of molecules. (shrink)

The essence of Kant’s conception of God is that God is constitutively, as opposed to causally, responsible for spatiotemporal existence: God is responsible for the world not by creating it but by grounding it. And, so Kant holds, God grounds it by virtue of being identical with it (or, more precisely, with its noumenal substrate: see below), with the qualification that, in being identical with it, he infuses it with his own rationality, this being manifested as natural law.

Chomsky's arguments for the existence of pre-experiential knowledge, and for the existence of sub-personal cognition, are clearly stated and shown to be cogent.

It is shown that institutions are fractals, meaning that are structurally the same as their parts, and that for this reason liberal institutions are quicker than conservative institutions to decay into a condition of abject psychopathy.

Neuroses are secondary mental illnesses, it being their purpose to contain psychoses.

This volume brings together some of Dr. Kuczynski's most important work on mathematical logic. The crushing power of Kuczynski's intellect is on full display in these paper, in which he introduces the neophyte to the basic principles of set theory and logic while at the very same time articulating new and important theorems of his own.

The term 'psychopath' is ambiguous. Sometimes it refers to people who have no integrity. And sometimes it refers to people are misanthropic but may nonetheless have integrity.

W.V.O. tried to prove that no statement is necessarily true. In this work, Quine's argument is stated, analyzed, and shown to be a broken argument for a false conclusion. It is shown that necessary truths are as important as empirical truths to the empirical sciences, the reason being that, without necessary truths, there is no way to organize or interpret data. It comes to light that, in addition to being false, every form of extreme empiricism (e.g. Dewey's pragmatism, Wittgenstein's verificationism, (...) Comte's positivism) is so incoherent that it cannot be clearly stated without thereby being refuted. (shrink)

The sciences are typically divided into the physical and the psychological—or, what comes to the same thing, the natural and the social. This is not the right way to divide the class of sciences. The right division is between the sciences that study entropic systems and the sciences that study counter-entropic systems. Biology and psychology study counter-entropic systems. Physics studies entropic systems. The concept of a function—not in the mathematical, but in the purpose-related sense---is completely alien to the logic of (...) the entropic sciences, but it is central to the logic of the counter-entropic sciences. (shrink)

An explanation of the psychology of the bureaucrat and of bureaucratic institutions.

An analysis of the concepts in terms of which we understand the internal (psychological) and external (physical) realms, with special emphasis being placed on the concepts of causality, interdisciplinary reduction, and the nature of the self. Special attention is given to the nature of psychological explanation, and substantive contentions about the nature of psychopathology are defended, especially in relation to OCD and psychopathy.

It is made clear what knowledge is and how we acquire it. It is also explained how we can have knowledge of the future, the past, the possible, the imperceptible, and the non-existent. The Gettier problem is solved, and it is proved that we have a priori knowledge, as well as knowledge of non-trivial but purely analytic truths.

Unless one has beliefs before having all of the data that would justify those beliefs, one will fail to acquire that data and, moreover, one will be a bureaucratic cripple, who cannot act because he is in a perpetual state of skepticism-induced decision-paralysis.

In recent years, the public sphere, which represents a realm in civil society where people can debate and discuss a range of issues and common concerns important to them, has become a key area for research in the humanities and social sciences. Arguably, however, Marxist theory has yet to advance a theoretical account of the most abstract and simple ideological properties of the capitalist public sphere as these appear under universal commodity relationships. The paper therefore tentatively seeks to develop such (...) an account. Specifically, the paper theoretically derives a peculiar public sphere under capitalism, which is mediated between at least two commodity owners who also possess distinctive personalities driven by desires to own commodities. The paper then explains in more detail how the social form of this public sphere develops through other elements of commodity relations and their contradictions. (shrink)

It is shown (i) that causation exists, since we couldn't even ask whether causation existed unless it did; (ii) that any given case of causation is a case of persistence; and (iii) that spatiotemporal relations supervene on causal relations. (ii) is subject to the qualification that we tend not to become aware of instances of causation as such except when two different causal lines---i.e. two different cases of persistence---intersect, resulting in a breakdown of some other case of persistence, this being (...) why we tend to regard instances of causation as fundamentally disruptive, as opposed to preservative in nature. The meaning of (iii) is that spatiotemporal relations are causal relations considered in abstraction of the various specific differences holding between different kinds of causation. (shrink)

The fallacy in Berkeley's argument for idealism is identified.

In this briskly written volume, a case is made that a value is a belief as to how one live one's life if one's psychological architecture is to retain its integrity, and a case is thereby made that intention is an operationalized value. This analysis makes it possible to distinguish between minds that do and minds that do not host selves. (Selves are minds that have values; minds that are not selves do not.) The relationship between weakness of the will (...) and self-deception is made clear, and it is explained how it is that one can knowingly act in self-destructive ways. (shrink)

This article discusses ethical implications for the academy in the use of cyberspace and virtual reality in conducting its teaching and research responsibilities. It identifies important cyberspace ethics concerns as they intersect with the academy and provides an ethical framework for coming to grips with them. Topics discussed here include the sine qua non of academic collegiality and civility, concerns about digital alteration of images and sounds, and issues pertaining to academic administration and infrastructure.

Do we choose our values or do our values choose us?

The following topics are discussed, from psychoanalytic, philosophical, and empirical perspectives: -/- *Sociopathy *Pedantry *The nature of bureaucrats *The nature of bureaucratic institutions *Rationalization and Repression *The relationship between ignorance and mental health *The relationship sapience and mental illness *The relationship between ignorance and the ability to act *The relationship between hyper-sapience and the inability to act. *The psychological underpinnings of addiction; and finally *The differences between men and women.

This thesis is a critical examination of three influential and interrelated aspects of Donald Davidson's philosophy of action. The first issue that is considered is Davidson's account of the logical form of action-sentences. After assessing the argument in support of Davidson's account, and suggesting certain amendments to it, I show how this modified version of Davidson's account can be extended to provide for more complicated types of action-sentences. The second issue that is considered is Davidson's views concerning the individuation of (...) actions; in particular, I examine Davidson's theory concerning the ontological implications of those sentences that assert that an agent did something by means of doing something else. The conclusion that I seek to establish in this case is essentially negative--that Davidson's theory is false. The third issue that is considered is Davidson's theory concerning the logical implications of those sentences that assert that an agent did something as a means of doing something else, which is also commonly known as the causal theory of action. Here I argue against Davidson's view by providing an alternative, and more satisfying response to the theoretical challenge that generates the causal theory. Subsequent to this I attempt to explain what motivates Davidson's commitment to the causal theory. (shrink)

That the central thesis of Donald Davidson’s classic article on metaphor “What Metaphor Means” (WMM) is ambiguous between a weak and a strong interpretation is the primary claim that I sought to establish in my article “Sentence Meaning, Speaker Meaning, and Davidson’s Denial of Metaphorical Meaning.” In addition to this, I argued that the weak claim is trivially true and the strong claim is obviously false. Therefore, I concluded that when the central thesis of WMM is disambiguated, it is insignificant. (...) Finally, I explained the ambiguity in that thesis in terms of Davidson’s neglect in WMM for the concept of speaker meaning and this, in turn, in terms of a certain theoretical orientation to language that Davidson held at the time of writing WMM. In his commentary on my article, “Speaker Meaning and Davidson on Metaphor: A Reply to McGuire,” Robert J. Stainton raises objections to several of the foregoing claims. In this article, I review and defend each of these claims against Stainton’s objections. (shrink)

A system is counterentropic to the extent that it has a fractal structure and entropic to the extent that it doesn't.

In this fictitious dialogue, it is shown that there are three kinds of freedom, each of which, though non-trivially different from the other two, is identical with the subject's being appropriately constitutive of a causally cohesive structure of some kind or other. Analogues of this point are proven to hold not just of personal freedom, but also of personal identity, and not just of personal identity, but also of objectual identity.

An analysis of Gibbon's five signs of civilizational decay.

When bad people try to be good, their supposed goodness turns out to be a mere extension of their badness and in fact compounds their badness by giving it a sheen of legitimacy.

Doing is about having ideals. Merely reacting isn't. Therefore people who lack integrity can react but cannot act.

The bureaucrat's intellectual configuration is identical with the psychopath's.

A fictitious dialogue in which an answer is given to the question: Why are the rates of psychosis and psychopathy in the United States so high?

It is discussed why it is beneficial to let go of anger. To this end, the teachings of the Buddha are discussed.

This short work proves the incompleteness of deductive logic. In other words, it proves that there is no recursive definition of K, where K is the class of all systems of logic.

According to a popular doctrine known as "intentionalism," two experiences must have different representational contents if they have different phenomenological contents; in other words, what they represent must differ if what they feel like differs. Were this position correct, the representational significance of a given affect (or 'quale'---plural 'qualia'--to use the preferred term), e.g. a tickle, would be fixed: what it represented would not be a function of the subject's beliefs, past experiences, or other facts about his past or present (...) psychological condition. To be sure, many a quale has a significance; but it is never a quale's intrinsic properties that assign it that significance, it being quale-external facts about the subject's psychological composition that do so. (An example of such a fact would be a belief on the subject's part to the effect that relevantly similar qualia are consistent with arthritis.). (shrink)

A mugging can overwhelm our ability to apply moral principles. When words fail, we still need advice that allows us to remain moral in the face of an attack. Self-defense offers just such advice and can be supported by utilitarian, deontological, and virtue approaches to ethics. Self-defense increases safety and security that enhance our freedom and well-being, which, in turn, allow us to survive and flourish as moral agents. Self-defense must, however, itself be qualified because its violent treatment of muggers (...) may produce human time bombs that reduce the safety and security of society.The martial art of Aikido trains our hand to act morally in the face of a physical attack when our mind is otherwise occupied. Aikido teaches self-defense, but it goes beyond self-centeredness to also protect the attacker. Such concern helps build community because it reduces vectors of resentment that spread when violence is perpetuated. The defense-only nature of Aikido teaches virtues in an embodied form on the mat. It offers philosophers an experiential and kinesthetic view of moral conduct that supplements and complements an exclusively intellectual approach. Moral philosophy cannot demand that we learn a martial art since it is only one of many possibilities to assist us in living a moral life; nevertheless, a reasonable attention to those conditions necessary for freedom and well-being entails an awareness of self-defense. (shrink)